The Unclad Soul

The New Year begins with some startling statistics. In a recent article on Counterpunch, Dr. Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York, offered a shocking list of dismal statistics regarding the state of America. We are first in the world’s military spending. In August of 2018, the president and Congress passed a gargantuan military budget of $717 billion. Can you imagine what that amount of money could do for American infrastructure, public education, health care, social services, and immigration reform? According to Demos, a public policy organization out of New York City, it would take approximately $175 billion to eliminate poverty in America. Eliminate it! Think about that. And yet, our war spending continues to climb. The Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently gave its latest report. In testing 540,000 students from 72 nations, American studen...

President Trump has not yet made the transition from Real Estate mogul to a political world leader. And it’s not certain he will ever be able to do that. A man his age is usually settled into the person he is from here on out and it’s all but impossible to make drastic changes. And drastic changes are needed. The world of high-end real estate, huge commercial building construction, casinos, hotels, and whatever other kinds of structures Mr. Trump can add his name to, is a far cry from the arena of world politics. There are at odd times glimpses that president Trump might actually have serious thoughts about how people should be treated and helped. But those get lost in his notoriously checkered history and in his perplexing persona. In the cut-throat universe of gigantic real estate projects, Mr. Trump established himself as a player. The massive buildings with his name emblazoned on them have successfully hidden the many failed and, as many have suggested, corrupt business de...

Historian Will Durant wrote in one of his books about “the few” who he said delight in thinking and understanding, “who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth.” “These are the   people” he wrote, “who stand aside unused by the world.” How perplexing that so often it is thinking people, gentle souls,   soft spoken   individuals, people of spiritual depth, unprofaned, compassionate to a fault, who “stand aside unused by the world.” I know these people. I have met them over the years. I have worked with them. They have been neighbors. They have been amazing friends. They live in quiet, modest homes, warm with welcome, blanketed with love. They are not famous. They have no massive assets. They do not run big companies. Their impact is not in power, or financial resources...

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity.”  ―   Bertrand Russell , Philosopher/Author

In her fascinating book, Dark Age Ahead , journalist and urban studies specialist Jane Jacobs writes about great cultures that come to a defeating and devastating close. The Roman Empire is an obvious example and she writes eloquently about its sad ruin. Her big point is that cultures die, even great brilliant ones, from what she calls “mass amnesia.” Meaning, the people of that culture just stubbornly forget the beauty of what they had created and trade it for something sinister, ugly, selfish and inferior. She writes, “Many subtractions combine to erase a previous way of life, and everything changes as a richer past converts to a meager present and an alien future.” Ms. Jacobs’ important book is a warning to Americans to beware of succumbing to “mass amnesia” and losing what was once a culture of genius, inventiveness, humane compassion, acumen and skill. Today we are getting a startling look into sections of our society that are seemingly unaware they are forgetting these v...

“Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to   tend carefully the garden of their minds . Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.”   ―  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,  Neuroscientist/Author  

Memorial Day is not a time for bragging. It is not a day of rolling out the big ships and the stealth bombers and waving flags. It is not a day to rile the enemy or to make threats to others in the world. It is a day to remember the fallen. To mourn those who gave their lives in the always bloody and violent dread and horror that war is. My father, two of my uncles, one of my aunts, and my older brother all served in the military and made it through WWII and the Vietnam War. I lost two boyhood friends in Vietnam. I helped carry the coffin of one of them and could not believe his 19 year old life was gone, forever. War is an offense to humanity. A brutal and often senseless act of murder and destruction.   Einstein once said, “ "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." We have not yet learned that in our country or hardly anywhere in the world. Today we should mourn that too.  Copyright 2015 Timothy Moody

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”  ~ Rumi, Persian Poet/Mystic

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”   ―   Alain de Botton ,  British Philosopher/Author

Let’s face it; racism in this country is a reality and a hideous evil. There is a great line from John Merrick, the Elephant Man, in the movie by the same title. Physically distorted, emotionally tormented because of his glaring differences, he tries to justify the cruelty of others by saying to a physician, “People are frightened by what they don’t understand.” Fear drives racism. It is a vicious fuel for all kinds of heartlessness. The simple truth is, far too many white people are terrified of black people. Terrified. And at the heart of that irrational fear is a gaping lack of understanding. There are too many of us who don’t want to understand others different from us. We’ve been white in this country so long we think the whole world is white, or should be. And we tremble with alarm that we just might someday no longer live in our dominating white world. We might then have to actually live along side of people who are a different color than us, have different cultural tr...

I have written about this before but it has to be said again. The murderous brutality showered upon the Palestinians by the Israeli military and Israel’s political leaders is a travesty beyond, in my opinion, any justification. Where are the voices for peace between Arabs and Jews? Where are world leaders saying enough of this bloodbath between Israel and Palestine? Where is there even a single recognizable person of influence willing to ask why Israel continues to destroy Gaza, building by building taking with them the lives of children and people simply wanting to have a normal life? Where are those voices? There are none. I understand all of the arguments against Hamas and its group of violent extremists. But there is nothing fair about the imbalance of power between Israel and Palestine. And why the world is not opposing this I cannot understand. Journalist and author Joshua Frank has made the obvious point that the continuous push of Israel to ultimately remove Palest...

The crisis in Syria is basically a civil war. It is a power struggle between conflicting ideologies. It started as an uprising against Assad’s dictatorship and a small faction attempting to have something like democracy without knowing what that really meant for them. Now, however, it has turned into something else. The rebel forces are apparently a jumble of insurgents including members of Al-Qaeda. So if we go in there and do whatever, blow up some of Assad’s military assets, or even topple the regime, do we want terrorists taking over things? How would a gang of Muslim extremists turning the place into an unbending theocracy be better for the Syrian people? Is President Obama simply trying to save face, hoping to keep from looking weak after making previous threats against Assad’s use of chemical weapons? Even with all of the horror that has gone on, there was no real threat to the U.S. Assad had never made any movement against our country (and neither as the world know...

Fear is a paralyzing, crippling emotion.  It takes all of the joy of spontaneous living out of us.  It keeps us off the paths of adventure and exploration.  It turns us sour on life and people.  It makes cowards of us. I was a very fearful boy.  I was afraid of the water and didn’t learn to swim until I took a beginning swim class in college.  I was determined to conquer that fear that had kept me out of so many fun and happy moments growing up.  And in spite of the embarrassment and terror of facing three mornings a week an Olympic size pool with a 15 foot deep end, I did learn to swim.  I was the only non-swimmer in a class of 50 guys.  I couldn’t even dog paddle.  But in the last week of class I had to dive into the deep end, tread water for 2 minutes, and then swim to the other end.  I did all of it and that class of guys lined the pool and watched and applauded when I finished and stood up out of the shallow end.  I ...